Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 30 i Vantage

ZAGATO’S centenary may well be turning into the longest birthday party in history, but it continues to deliver some special cars. Swiss-based R-Reforged has released a little more information about its V12 Zagato Heritage Twins, which are being built to mark 100 years of Zagato and 60 years of the creative partnership with Aston Martin. And, we have to say, it’s exciting stuff. Just to recap, the Heritage Twins – Speedster and Coupé – are based upon the late-model V12 Vantage S. As their name suggests, the rebodied cars are being sold as a pair for £1.75m plus taxes. Just 19 pairs will be built. They inhabit a rarefied area of the market. Not a pure continuation, nor a restomod, they are an extreme evolution of the original V12 Zagato,…

IT IS JARRING to look back at the Market Watch page in the last issue of Vantage, produced at a time when we were preoccupied with such trivialities as buying trends, exchange rate volatility and political upheaval. There’s nothing like a deadly, world-stopping pandemic to give you a bit of perspective. Dozens of events and auctions have been struck from the calendar since early March, including some around which folks had planned their entire year. Most notably, the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance is off for just the second time since 1950, and the Pebble Beach auction held by Gooding & Co has been nixed, too. Generally speaking, though, auction houses can no more afford to remain shuttered for months on end than your local chip shop can, and so an…

‘My very first piece of production design was the battery cover on the Ford Mondeo.’ So says Aston Martin’s director of design, Miles Nurnberger, with an amused hint of pride. It’s not the blockbusting, self-congratulatory anecdote you might expect from one of the world’s leading car designers, but as you quickly come to understand when chatting to him, Nurnberger’s career is the result of early promise, limitless passion, repeated setbacks and dogged persistence. Born in 1976 to German parents and raised in the Berkshire town of Windsor, Nurnberger’s childhood was pretty much a perfect case-study in the combined influences of nature and nuture. ‘My dad was always into cars,’ he tells me. ‘Before I was born he had a couple of Lancia Montecarlos. He wrapped the first one around a…

APPARENTLY IN SPACE no-one can hear you scream. I reckon that if you’re wedged into the boot aperture of a V8 Volante, hurtling down the Mulsanne straight and trying to take pictures of a pursuing gaggle of Astons in the swirling vortices, the same might be true. Photographer Michael Bailie was putting a brave face on it – chiefly in the form of a rictus grin. Me? Following feet behind, I couldn’t stop giggling – both at the sight of poor Michael but mostly at the sheer absurd joy of the situation: driving the full Le Mans circuit, on race day, in the fastest roadgoing Aston Martin yet. By the third lap, those of us in the faster cars had accelerated away from the pack and were howling along the…

Mercedes’ three-pointed star, Porsche’s shield, Ferrari’s cavallino rampante… Each as instantly recognisable as the McDonalds arches or the Apple, erm, apple. The best car badges are not only readily identifiable, they’re an intrinsic part of a brand’s identity. And then there are Aston Martin’s wings, which, in terms of pure artistry, soar above almost all others. They seem to have been around forever. In fact the design we recognise today has been around for almost 90 years, and it arrived only after a couple of false starts. One hundred years ago, the earliest Aston Martins didn’t have wings at all. They wore a circular badge with the letters A and M neatly superimposed. This was the Lionel Martin era, the design believed to be the work of his wife Kate,…

‘I’m no engineer. I’m not really a car man at all.’ It’s an interesting opening line from the man who used to run Aston Martin. So why exactly did Alan Curtis get into the Aston business? ‘My sons!’ he laughs. ‘They were both mad about James Bond!’ It’s a couple of summers ago, and we’re chatting in the sun-dappled garden of a favourite pub near Curtis’s Surrey home. Now in his 90s, he hasn’t enjoyed the best of health in recent times, but he’s great company and has some wonderful tales of the part he played in Aston Martin’s mid-70s resurgence. ‘In ’73-74 things were going quite well for me [Curtis’s business was in property and construction]. I had a Ferrari Dino and an E-type, both of which I loved.…

The first thought, as I sit behind the huge wood-rim steering wheel and look out over the long, narrow bonnet, is how small the DB4 feels. With fresh memories of modern Aston Martins, it’s almost like settling into a two-thirds scale model. All sports cars, I reflect, should be this tight and light. After years of exacting restoration work, this 1960 Aston is alive again and we’re heading to Djurgården, the park in central Stockholm where it met a dramatic fate in the early hours of Monday, July 3, 1961. How will the car react as we round the corner where it went off and collided heavily with a tree? Will I, burdened by the weight of the moment, do something stupid behind the wheel? The Aston certainly feels ready…

THE WORLD didn’t stop turning, but pretty much everything else ground to a halt during the early stages of the Covid-19 lockdown. For Aston Martin, the enforced shutdown of production facilities and its worldwide dealer network was as challenging as it sounds. Yet like all other automotive manufacturers hit by the coronavirus pandemic, Aston’s response – both to the lockdown and reopening – has been swift and systematic. ‘We closed on the 25th of March,’ said communications director Kevin Watters. ‘Production stopped at Gaydon and St Athan and back-office staff were sent home. Seventy-five per cent of staff were furloughed, but they will resume work in phases as each facility comes on stream.’ During the lockdown closures, some personnel were involved in the production of more than 1000 sets of…

1959 1000km Nürburgring photo by Jesse Alexander £POA | faheykleingallery.com It is a measure of Stirling Moss’s achievements that most obituary writers could not find room to mention his win at the 1959 1000km Nürburgring, a race in which he was forced to come from behind, twice. He was peerlessly fast around the Nordschleife that day, and he was quick off the line, too. Jesse Alexander captured him sprinting towards his DBR1; in the next shot, taken brief seconds later, Moss’s Aston was already out of sight. Vulcan model by AutoArt $220 | autoartmodels.com ‘[It looks] as exciting as anything with four wheels ever has,’ said Vantage scribe Jethro Bovingdon of the full-size Vulcan, and the car is every bit as dramatic at 1:18-scale, as demonstrated by this detailed composite…

So here’s what we do know. Aston Martin’s all-new, in-house-designed engine – codenamed TM01 after legendary engine designer Tadek Marek – is a twin turbocharged, dry-sumped 3.0-litre V6. With its turbochargers nestled within the vee – hence the so-called ‘hot vee’ description – the TM01‘s compact packaging reflects Aston’s intention to use it in both mid-engined and front-engined models. Future-proofing will come in the form of a new range of hybrid systems. Straight hybrid and plug-in hybrid systems have been mentioned, but no detail offered. Needless to say, the engine will comply with future Euro 7 emissions regulations. Aston Martin powertrain chief engineer Joerg Ross is keeping his cards close to his chest on the specifics. ‘The brief was to create a competitive engine from a performance point of view…

BÉDOIN WAS SWELTERING at 44deg C in the shade. Fans on and idling lumpily, the old Aston’s newly built engine was keeping its needles roughly steady, which was more than could be said for the driver. Sweat stung my eyes and soaked the collar of my borrowed fire-proofs while butterflies did loop-de-loop in my stomach. What was I thinking? What kind of quixotic gesture was it to imagine that two brothers in an old car could take on the best historic racers, the most powerful cars and one of the oldest and longest hillclimbs in the world? Mont Ventoux; a 4603ft, extinct volcano rising up from a Provençal plain in the South of France. A 10-mile, 50-corner road winding up through vineyards and olive groves and out beyond the snow-line…

IT WAS GOING to be such a fun weekend. It was to be my fifth Silverstone 24 Hours, a race I’d always enjoyed and managed somehow to finish. This was 2015 and I was to share a Vantage GT4 – called James – with newly minted Aston CEO Andy Palmer who’d only just done enough races to lose his rookie sticker. With us would be Aston design boss Marek Reichman who’d raced plenty, including in Astons, and Alice Powell, our young hotshot, then current Asian Formula Renault Champion, the only woman to have scored points in GP3 and a multiple winner in F3. A 24-hour race – any 24-hour race – feels completely different. There is a sense of the intrepid you just don’t get in shorter-format racing. Even if…

THE GLOVEBOX LID fell open. I didn’t comment because I was busy, as was my passenger. He’d wedged his left hand hard into the Vantage’s luxurious headlining and I was gripping the steering wheel hard, with a frankly alarming half a turn of lock on, at an indicated 180mph. The top lane of Millbrook’s two-mile, banked bowl gets interesting into three figures. Its ‘hands-off’ speed – the speed at which a car will steer itself – is 100mph, so at anything over this you’re cornering. I’d learned over a number of years testing that, generally, up to 150mph is OK but beyond this speed the lateral-g starts to get uncomfortable, the strain on the car and its tyres tangible. We knew the Vantage had the potential to go very fast,…

Imagine settling into the driver’s seat of your new Vantage, looking down at the centre console and finding the gaping, sandwich-sized slot of an 8-track player where the DAB/MP3 head unit should be. Finding a manual gearlever in your £100k-plus GT is almost the same these days. Ferrari hasn’t sold a manual in almost a decade, it’s been five years since you could get a stick-shift Audi R8, and Porsche has taken its time bringing the manual version of the new 911 to market. Yet, despite the manual gearbox’s waning popularity, a three-pedal Vantage was always in the plan. The first with it, the limited-run, 200-off Vantage AMR, arrived late last year (Vantage issue 28) but this is the series-production version. So the obvious question has to be: why choose…

IT’S A STANDING joke among the Vantage team that our quarterly publication schedule always means our summer issue goes to press just before the Le Mans 24 Hours. This means our report from the greatest endurance race of them all has to wait until the autumn issue – a full three months after the race ended. Thanks to Covid-19 there is no Le Mans 24 Hours this summer. Instead, the highlight of the endurance racing calendar will be held on September 19-20, in a shortened 2019/20 World Endurance Championship season that resumes at Spa-Francorchamps on August 15 and ends in Bahrain on November 21. For Aston Martin Racing’s GTE Pro and Am teams (plus factory-supported independent squad TF Sport) it has been a uniquely strange period. With workshops closed and…

Hummingbird Single Speed Paul Smith Edition From £3995 | hummingbirdbike.com A collision of British institutions, this: designer (and keen cyclist) Paul Smith has added his signature stripes to the Hummingbird Single Speed, the lightest folding bike in the world, which is built by the clever folks at Prodrive. Breitling Superocean Heritage ’57 Limited Edition II From £3590 | breitling.com Add this to the very short list of good things to have come out of the pandemic so far: a limited-edition, rainbow-dial version of a classic Breitling design, created to raise money for organisations supporting frontline healthcare workers, including NHS Charities Together. Desirables is compiled by Chris Bietzk. If you’d like to have an item considered for inclusion, email eds@vantagemag.co.uk Barton Perreira 007 Norton sunglasses $440 | bartonperreira.com You’ll have to…

Even in the Hot Wheels fantasy catalogue, there’s nothing quite like this Daz-white monster. It looks like a Vauxhall Magnum after a year with Joe Wicks; pumped-up wheelarches stretched over Carlos Fandango wheels, sills like a couple of press benches, and a flip-up bonnet that’s more vent than substance. And while it’s the shortest car in Aston Engineering’s workshop by a country mile (though much the widest), it makes the surrounding selection of Aston Martin’s finest look, well, a bit weedy. In July 2012, when it was up for sale, Top Gear magazine noted that ‘it looks so utterly hostile that we feel a sense of personal gratitude that it hasn’t come to the Top Gear office and punched us in the middle of the face,’ although you might tartly…

IT HAPPENED in the middle of 2016, when this particular Aston Martin was 82 years old. This is not an age or shape of car that non-expert car-fanciers might even equate with the Aston marque, which gives an extra level of intrigue. Then you can add that it’s an ex-works racer built for Le Mans, and that despite its age it has never been fully restored, just remedied when things were getting rough. A pre-war racing Aston is already fabulous enough as an idea. What makes LM14 the very highest point of the many fabulous drives I’ve had in Astons of all ages and persuasions – three other standouts are the Project Vantage concept car, DB4 Zagato 2 VEV, and attempting to max an early DBS V8 in Germany –…

Earlier this year, Aston Martin accepted an offer – inevitably billed as a rescue – of a £182m investment from a consortium led by Canadian billionaire Lawrence Stroll. Canadian? Rescue? Bells ringing. Forty-five years ago, another Canadian, George Minden, and an American, Peter Sprague, really did rescue the beloved brand. In January 1975, Aston Martin wasn’t just in need of a capital injection, it was broke. The Gaydon line may have paused this year for Covid-19 but, as 1975 dawned at Newport Pagnell, tools were downed, tea mugs stilled, and the doors shut seemingly for good. The slow-motion crash dated from February 1972. Sir David Brown, his tractor empire in severe trouble, abruptly sold unprofitable Aston to a Midlands-based firm of property developers, Company Developments. The price was later revealed…

It’s a perfect coincidence that I’m writing this on March 27, 2020, because today is the 40th anniversary of the public unveiling of Aston Martin’s only fully finished mid-engined road car to date. What’s more, that launch happened just a few miles up the road from where I’m typing, at The Bell in Aston Clinton, Bucks. Spooky or what? The 200mph-plus Bulldog was billed as the company’s engineering showcase. Although there had been early suggestions that as many as 25 could be built for wealthy customers, lack of development funds meant that just the one example was ever built. Its shape was the work of William Towns, who had styled the ‘wedge’ Lagonda and the DBS before it, but the Bulldog brought futuristically angular brutalism to a new level. Especially…